Rare splendor on display at High Museum’s Habsburg show

At least, that’s how the Habsburgs might have it. The Habsburgs were one of Europe’s most powerful and wealthiest families, consolidating power beginning in the 13th century and dominating Europe for more than 500 years, amassing a collection of the finest treasures and masterpieces from around the world. More than 90 priceless objects from the Habsburgs’ vast collection currently housed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna will be in Atlanta Oct. 18-Jan. 17 as part of the traveling exhibition “Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections” at the High Museum of Art.

“This exhibition is all about, not just Habsburg splendor, but spectacle,” said Gary Radke, consulting curator for the High. “I think there’s a clear sense that they believed if you had high status, you should show it. You had to confirm that position with spectacular displays, with processions, with jousts, with fabulous dinner parties. That’s all indicated here.”

No one who catches a glimpse of the Habsburgs’ possessions could ever question their worldly status. From intricate suits of armor to the lushest fabrics, from fairytale carriages to inlaid crystal, carved ivory and solid gold, the Habsburgs set out to impress, and the representative objects selected from the Kunsthistorisches Museum give just a taste of what life must have been like for Europe’s ruling family of aristocrats.

The exhibition is the brainchild of former High Museum Director Michael Shapiro and former High Chief Curator David Brenneman, both of whom sought to establish ties between the High and the major cultural institutions of Europe, including a three-year relationship with the Louvre Museum in Paris. The idea for the exhibition started to take shape seven years ago. Since Shapiro has since retired and Brenneman was appointed director of the Indiana University Art Museum in July of 2015, Radke has stepped in as guest curator as the exhibition arrives in Atlanta. The traveling show debuted in Minneapolis in February and stopped in Houston this summer before its arrival at the High in October.

The exhibition is organized chronologically so visitors gain a sense of the evolution of the tastes and collecting habits of the Habsburgs. The first room features objects commissioned or collected by the Habsburgs from the 13th-16th centuries. Visitors stepping off the elevator into the gallery will be greeted by an impressive display of original suits of armor seated on model horses arranged in a joust. The steel suits weigh more than 80 pounds each, and as elaborate and serious as they look, they were actually designed, not for grown men on the battlefield, but for young boys to use in competition.

In the 13th century, the Habsburgs were petty dukes and small rulers who, through a series of strategic marriages and military conquests, became the Holy Roman Emperors, the most powerful and high-ranking family in Europe whose empire spread across the continent. The works in the exhibition belonged to the Austrian branch of the family, though the pieces themselves originally entered their collection from Italy, Spain, and other places in Europe and the New World.

The second gallery contains exotic objects from the age of discovery, the 16th century. The room is arranged as a “wunderkammer,” or a room of wonders, a style of interior that became very popular in Europe in the early 1600s, as aristocrats sought to display the exotic materials arriving from the New World in rooms that were a combination of natural history, art history and ethnography.

It’s impossible to put a price tag on the objects, Radke said.

“All the objects are extraordinarily rare. There may be objects that could be considered less expensive since they’re silver objects with gold leaf on them instead of solid gold, but even then the craftsmanship is irreplicable. They’re all rare, rare objects.”

Among the most impressive rooms in the exhibition is the gallery of paintings from the Habsburgs’ collection. The room at the High is arranged to recreate the great painting galleries of Vienna, with works by all of the major artists of the 17th-century Venetian tradition and from several other European schools as well. Paintings by Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Velasquez and Holbein are included, and many of the pieces have never been displayed previously in the U.S. before. “Any of the names you would know from a basic survey of European art, there’s a painting by them, and it is of extremely high quality,” explains Radke.

A famous work by Correggio, “Jupiter and Io,” is being used to promote the exhibition; you’ll see the image on the cover of the catalog, on posters, buses and banners all around town. Radke says it was selected because its lushness, detail and sensuality are indicative of the Habsburgs’ tastes and their collecting impulse across the centuries. “It is really one magnificently sensual painting,” he says. The work came from a collection that was originally produced in Italy for the Duke of Mantua; it passed into another collection before being bought by the Habsburgs in the 18th century.

“Correggio is an artist who obviously knew Leonardo da Vinci and was working in that era. It’s a stunner. If just that were in the exhibition, we would still have plenty of people ooh’ing and ah’ing.”

Curiously, none of the paintings are displayed in their original frames. As they entered the Habsburg collection, they were put into architectural frames in the Habsburg Palaces. “They lined them up and used them almost like wallpaper,” says Radke. When admiring the dynamic 16th-century Tintoretto masterpiece “Susanna and the Elders,” keep an eye out for an inventory number, 867, hastily painted by a Habsburg functionary on the bottom right of the work.

The exhibition continues with rooms containing a Baroque ceremonial carriage and sleigh with carvings by master craftsman Balthasar Ferdinand Moll, a 19th-century velvet dress made for Empress Elisabeth and a gorgeous evening gown made for Princess Kinsky around 1905. The party came to an end for the Habsburgs after World War I when the empire was broken up and the family sent into exile.

After January, everything goes back to Vienna to reenter the collections at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where the objects number in the tens of thousands. “We have 90 objects and it already feels almost like too much, it’s so wonderfully rich,” Radke says. “So many exhibitions have the word ‘masterpiece’ in them. But this really is a show of masterpieces. Every single object could be the focus of an exhibition on its own.”